Spider-Pig

The Simpsons Movie

(2007)

So, Friday night I didn't watch a movie because I got so wrapped up in Turbo Tax that I didn't even have a proper dinner (and in a certain laptop-nerddom symmetry, Saturday a.m. I woke up about 4 and spent the next 5 hours or so working on the spreadsheet to track my Mets ticket resales for the coming season).

Then last night I did watch a movie, but my head was in so many different places that I simply forgot to blog it. So I've falsified the date and time of this post, but you know, with a complex and intellectually and emotionally challenging film like this, there's really not much point trying to recapture my live viewing reaction. Shock and awe, I remember shock and awe.

Oh, and fair warning: Illini basketball game at the awkward time of 6 p.m. to(Sunday)night, so I won't be watching a movie after that, either.

Dial E for espionage

MLK and Inauguration weekend M4

Bonuses, bonuses! First, I got into Grand Central plenty early, and it was a sunny day in the 50s (a perfect day to spend inside in a dark room, I like to say), so I got to take a pleasant mile-and-a-half downtown stroll before settling into the program. The the cashier at Cinema Village charged my credit card only 6 bucks--senior price (yeah, OK, that's not an altogether good thing)--and by the time I noticed, it wasn't worth going back and insisting on paying more.

Later I saved even more money when I discovered that the two noirs from the years just before my birth were being treated as an old-fashioned double feature--one $12.50 admission for the pair! Finally, I unexpectedly made the 9:34 train (cutting it so close that I had no time to buy my usual cookie and soda before board, thus saving me another 5 bucks or so, against my will) and was thus snug in my bed before midnight.

Oh, and in addition to the nice bonuses, the movies were good too.

Fairhaven

CV

Yes, this is the sort of indy film that has bringing me here for a dozen years or so: quiet without being soporific, heartfelt without being goopy, human and engaging and sad and funny.

Three buddies from a nowhere town, Dave (Chris Messina), the lone escapee, returning for his father's funeral; Jon (Tom O'Brien), a writer chafing against his job on a fishing boat; and Sam (Rich Sommer), a real-estate agent with a daughter and an ex-wife--an ex-wife with whom, Jon is upended to learn, Dave had an affair years earlier when the couple was struggling.

So no: no new narrative trails blazed here. Doesn't matter; the well-worn trails are driven with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.

Barbara

Ang

Geez, hadn't been to the Angelika in . . . well, let's just see . . . in almost 5 years, since seeing Paranoid Park there on Easter weekend 2008. And apart from showing me an excellent movie, they didn't do anything to make me want to come back soon: their computers were down, so no credit card purchases--OK, unavoidable perhaps, but what was not unavoidable was making us stand in a long line snaking down the Houston Street sidewalk in conditions that had become a little cooler and lots windier because only one cashier was working the two-window booth.

So why was I there? Because this seems a film that might slip through the New Haven cracks, and (duh) I didn't want to risk missing it. Good call, and I won't second-guess myself if it does come to town. It's East Germany in the '80s, and the title character (Nina Hoss) is a sullen doctor exiled to a provincial clinic for unspecified irregularities (though it later becomes clear to the audience that the authorities are right to suspect her devotion to the communist cause).

There she meets André (Ronald Zehrfeld), a colleague who confesses to her the transgression that got him there--to which her reaction is to ask, "Is that the story they told you to tell me?" André is simultaneously puppy-dog infatuated with a woman he sense will be even more beautiful if she ever smiles and determined to encourage her to trust, to become a willing part of the community and the medical team that he has come to love, notwithstanding the circumstances and forces that put him there.

This is a very good film that forfeits its chance to be a great one with a stage-managed conclusion straight out of Hollywood.

The Thief (1952)

FF

Allan Fields (Ray Milland) is America's dumbest nuclear physicist, insufficiently sharp to realize that you don't escape the FBI agent tailing you by climbing the stairs up from the 88th floor of the Empire State.

Fields has been sending secrets to the commies, though why is unclear: he obviously hates himself for doing it and would stop if he could, but he can't. It would be a gripping Cold War spy drama without the gimmick, but the gimmick raises it a couple of notches: it's silent. Well, sans dialogue. There's plenty of sound: traffic noise, jazz from the apartment of the sultry and seemingly randy neighbor (played by the aptly named Rita Gam), and--especially--the phone, ringing three times and stopping, the signal from his handler.

Why silence is brilliant is that it encapsulates the isolation of a man who has betrayed his country and his vocation, who has no friends or family in evidence, whose relationships even with colleagues is nodding at best--whose relationship even with his spy handlers is limited to delivery of instructions and Minox film cassettes en passant. In films that could not but be silent, there is plenty of language, whether on title cards or simply in pantomime. This film recognizes that it is language more than anything that links us, and the silence here is a vacuum of language, making the story far darker and more discomfiting than it could otherwise be.

Until a presumably Hays-mandated ending that in fact punishes Fields less than the outcome toward which we seemed to be heading, one tough-minded piece of noir.

Blast of Silence (1961)

FF

The first time I saw this I was so involved in what was old and what was new that I didn't notice how much Allen Baron's visual idiom here influenced Francis Ford Coppola and David Chase when they painted their gangster hits. Interesting that this too has a conclusion that the Hays Committee would have approved, the difference being that the conclusion here is the only one the story could reasonably have reached.

Trailers

• Molly's Theory of Relativity--Earning power & marital solidarity; could be a gem, could be blah.
• Starbuck--Looks like one of those farces that encourages us that the French can be just as stupid as us.
• A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III--Roman Coppola wrote and directs Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray.
• No--Gael García Bernal is an ad man charged with bringing down Pinochet. Oh yes.
• Blancanieves--Director Pablo Berger has clearly studied Almodóvar and del Toro.
• Yossi--Sequel to Yossi and Jagger, which I wanted to like more than I actually did.

People of the book

El laberinto del fauno (Pan's labyrinth)

(2006)

OK, what we used to call The Bicycle Thief we now call Bicycle Thieves, and what we used to call Remembrance of Things Past we now call In Search of Lost Time, so someday maybe we'll call this The Faun's Labyrinth. Or maybe not.

As grim a fairy tale as the Grimms ever imagined, positively Tarantinean in its bloodletting and torture, and yet still one of the most beautiful and touching films of the millennium. But seriously, Guillermo, it's time for something new that's not part of the Hellboy franchise. IMDb lists Pacific Rim, starring my fellow Arsenal backer Idris Elba, this summer, but that doesn't look it's going to break any new ground either. Now Pinocchio, supposedly in preproduction . . . that might be interesting, and if the cast rumors are accurate, it might prove that Ron Perlman and Tom Waits are not the same person. Oh, wait, no it won't: it's animated.

Won't get to get what I'm after . . .

American Beauty

(1999)

Ah, what better moment to die that when feeling really good about oneself and, for the first time in memory, about life itself?

It's possible a sticker fell off, but if not, it had been nearly 8 years since I'd screened this, and as it has shown me before, when I give it a little time, I can fall in love with it all over again. Yes, it's a little inflated in spots; yes, Annette Bening's remarkable work is in service of a character with about as much emotional depth as Godzilla; I don't care. The beatific smile on Kevin Spacey's face when his Lester Burnham realizes how good he feels for having done one right thing after several self-affirming things covers a multitude of sins, as does what might be Chris Cooper's best performance ever (tall cotton, that) as Lester's tightly wound Marine colonel neighbor.

And has anyone seen a plastic bag dancing in the wind in the past 13 years without thinking of this film?

Base eight

Spider-Man 2

(2004)

So I wonder: how much could you get for Spidey's discarded kit on eBay?

Le Rouge et le noir et le blanc

De rouille et d'os (Rust and bone)

Crit

Yeah, we've seen before the vulnerable woman falling for the guy who is clearly bad news because of commitment problems. He hasn't always taken his adorable son away from his drug-dealing wife, and he's not always making a buck in anything-goes boxing matches, but I think it's safe to say that the main new thing here is that she is SeaWorld-type orca trainer whose legs get chomped off by one of her pupils and who appears with CGI no-legs the rest of the way.

Fine performances by Marion Cotillard (duh) and Matthias Schoenaerts (of Bullhead), and the CGI leglessness is convincing--worth seeing, not a must. One heartbreaking scene: Stéphanie sitting on her balcony, repeating the arm gestures from her act, hearing the music in her head.

Trailers

• Now You See Me--Magician heisters; great cast, looks engaging.
• West of Memphis--This territory has been covered in the Paradise Lost films, so I'm not sure what's new or necessary here.

Remembrance of things future

12 Monkeys

(1995)

Huh! Joseph Melito, who plays young James Cole here, looks a lot like Chandler Lindauer, who played young Butch a year earlier.

I've been thinking for a long time that I'd like to see this again, and a free trial of a zillion premium channels this weekend gave me the easy opportunity. I vaguely recalled it as futuristic and dystopic, but I had no idea when I sat down to it tonight that it's about a man who goes into the past in an effort to improve his present by preempting a disaster, then gets blindsided by love, which, as harmonics would have it, also describes the excellent novel I'm just about to finish.

Death from the sky

Zero Dark Thirty

Crit

Can I just say one thing before we start? I acknowledge that Osama bin Laden was a very bad man, and I don't mourn him. But the widespread whooping after his death as if we'd just won a football game diminishes us. Bad actor or not, this was a human life we terminated with prejudice, and the only people who have a right to rejoice are the members of the navy Seal Team Six who had a job to do and did it; the rest of us can be grateful for their success, but quietly, please, solemnly.

This is fine filmmaking if suspect history, and apart from the fact that the directors of at least 4 Best Picture-nominated films were bound not to be nominated by name, I'm not sure how you can nominate it for the big prize without recognizing Kathryn Bigelow.

But about that suspect history: reading complaints about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" strategies in obtaining solid intelligence, I thought, "hey, it's a movie, it's based on actual events, but it doesn't pretend to be a documentary." But it really does matter. I could live with the ostensibly good guys getting some information, even a key piece of information, via overzealous tactics, if they at least considered that the ends have to be pretty damned important to justify such means.

But in the first place, no, there's little suggestion that any of the intelligence agents have any qualms about what some of us might call torture, and second, the narrative suggests that without these tactics, we might as well not even have bothered to look for "UBL," as the target is called, via the less familiar transliteration Usama.

Let me put the difference in terms that I can understand, whether you can or not: it has always bothered me that Eddie Collins is portrayed as a right-handed batter in Eight Men Out, but that flaw isn't significant enough within the narrative to matter much. But if Collins were portrayed as a power-hitting outfielder, that might be too big a falsehood or sloppiness for the film to survive. I wouldn't say that misrepresentation of the effectiveness of torture kills this film for me, but it certainly makes me respect it a lot less--it is, for me, a well-made film with one extraordinary performance (yes, Jessica Chastain is as good as you've heard), but one that cheats.

But it does extend a really positive trend of the 2010s: the trend of seeing lots more of Jennifer Ehle (with a Texas accent, no less!) than we have in previous decades.

Twenty-four hours later: it's not a religious issue for me, but stalwart protesters outside the theater today persuaded me to include this for your further edification.

Trailers

• The Place Beyond the Pines--Good guy does bad things for good cause; sound familiar?
• 42--Ooooh, I want this Jackie Robinson biopic to be good, but the trailer does not fill me with confidence. Chadwick Boseman, who has been in a lot of TV I haven't seen, as JR, an unrecognizable Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey.

Remember Sammy Jankis

Memento

(2000)

Yes, I'll admit, this was another of my faux-deaccession candidates: I never intended to give away the disc. But the fact that it had gone unwatched for the requisite 5 years+ to make it eligible speaks to the film having lost some of its early glow.

That rest, though (and perhaps the damage wrought upon my own brain, not by a blow to the head but by repeated blows from the calendar), allowed me to forget just enough plot detail to rejuvenate Christopher Nolan's breakthrough. It can never be as much of an insurrection against narrative assumptions as it was when I first saw it on the big screen at BAM, but neither does it seem as cynically gimmicky as it had begun to when I watched it in 2007.

So maybe I should give it 'til 2018 before screening it again?

Natural habitat

Attenberg

(2010)

Opening: the least-erotic, funniest girl-kissing-girl sequence ever.

Sweet sixteenish and never been otherwise kissed, Marina (Ariane Labed) occupies a circumscribed world: the only other occupants who matter are her more experienced friend Bella (Evangelia Randou), with whom she likes to go on silly walks in dresses identical but for symbolic colors; her terminally ill father, an architect and genuine Greek philosopher, with whom she likes to watch the wildlife documentaries of Sir David Attenborough; and the unnamed fare (Giorgos Lanthimos) of the car service for which she works, with whom she likes to play foosball and then talk nonstop while shedding her virginity.

Quirky without being false or ostentatious, just an absolutely lovely character study--rather like those Attenborough films.

Love and war

The Countess

(2009)

Look, I love Julie Delpy (who wrote, directed, and starred in this oddity), but what the what? First thing I want to know is: was the screenplay really in English, and if so, was it intentionally written to sound like a stilted translation, and if not, was it translated intentionally to sound like a stilted translation, and was the dubbing sometimes off, or was that just the Netflix stream? OK, that's more than one thing.

Oddly, the usual sources--the New York Times, RottenTomatoes.com--reveal little, except that the picture seems to have gone straight to video (no NYT review, only 2 on RT). How about Wikipedia? Well, there we find that it showed at Berlin and Cannes. And there's a link to an interview before she made the film, where she talks about the theme of female power in the 17th-century setting, and yes, that could have been a strong element, as might have been the narrative ambiguity (did she or did she not kill 400 virgins in order to keep herself young with their blood?--a potentially intriguing question, I think you'll agree), if only I hadn't been so distracted by everyone talking as I imagine characters in Harlequin Romances talk.

Springtime

Cabaret

(1972)

Well, this was a no-brainer as soon as I saw that it had just cleared the 2-year threshold for DVR deaccessioning: an infinitely better representative of the personal-lives-playing-off-of-sociopolitical-watersheds musical genre than the one I saw last week, and a show whose latest Broadway incarnation featured the guy who carried today's earlier film.

I remember the first time I saw this, in a classic old movie palace in New Orleans, with my then-girlfriend (later first wife) Sue and an old friend of the family Katie (two ladies!). I also remember that the last time I saw it, which must have been close to a decade ago, if not more, I decided that it had run its course. The time off has revived it somewhat, but I still find it a collection of grade A songs wrapped in a C+ story. But oh, those songs!

however, . . .

Any Day Now

Crit

Let's compare the last film I went to in 2012 with the first I've attended in 2013:

• Bladder-friendly narrative economy: 157 minutes vs. 97; no contest.
• Miscarriage of justice: 19 years at hard labor and unending postparole harassment for stealing a loaf of bread in the late 18th century vs. persistent court refusal to grant custody of an ungainly teenager with Down syndrome to the only people who love and want him because they are a gay couple in the late 1970s; Les Miz, but it's close.
• Diva moment: Anne Hathaway belting about dreaming a dream vs. Alan Cumming lip-synching to "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"; it's a push.

Unsubtle, deck-stacked, but lovely and heart-wrenching. If nothing else, this will give me something to associate with Garret Dillahunt other than the cowardly murderer and the sociopathic murderer he played in consecutive seasons of Deadwood. I spent the entire film pitying him his grotesque hair, and all the more so once I realized that it was exactly my hair in that era. As for Cumming, I've never included him on the list of guys I'd change teams for, but I think I need to reconsider, notwithstanding his odd attempt at a Queens accent.

May I have the envelope, please . . .

OK, let's start with the easy: my three favorite movies of the year, without any question, were Moonrise Kingdom (for sheer feel-good smiles), Ruby Sparks (for a stunningly tough and smart dissection of romantic narrative), and Cloud Atlas (for audacious and mostly successful ambition).

But if you're asking "best," that's probably Lincoln--which, I hasten to add, is also enormously entertaining, but I use the b-word because it is also so much much of what the movies can do big, to engage head and heart and soul. Unless, of course, The Master--about which I exited the theater of such mixed minds that I didn't even include it last night--is the best for the same reason.

To those four-plus, I'll add six more that moved me or wowed me or tickled me for a top ten or eleven, the ordering alphabetical, the criteria floating:

• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Cloud Atlas
• Damsels in Distress
• Django Unchained
• Footnote
• Holy Motors
• Lincoln
• The Master (maybe)
• Moonrise Kingdom
• Ruby Sparks
• A Separation

The D was silent

I begin this 90 minutes before the new year comes to my time zone, and I don't expect to finish before I break for the split of Veuve Clicquot, but the rules are the same as the past two years: I'm just going to sift through the past 365 days' first-time screenings, no matter when released, and hang the notables on the wall, perhaps for some sort of numeric judgment, perhaps not . . .

January, typically, was notable only for a leftover from the previous year, but A Separation was one hell of a leftover; remind me: did it win the foreign-film Oscar®? Even if not, it wins my award for best Iranian film I've seen in any year.

February began with the breathtaking dance performance-cum-documentary Pina--also a 2011 Oscar® nomination (and yes, I just checked: A Separation won foreign). The coming-of-age, coming-out-in-a-middle-class-African-American-community Pariah is an excellent film with an awful trailer.

OK, I know I didn't spend the whole year being impressed only by art-house and/or foreign films, but the first best of March was the Albanian revenge feud drama The Forgiveness of Blood. OK, here, honorable mention for a studio film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a minor gem with a meaty part for sexygenarian Susan Sarandon. Enough slumming, though: from Israel comes Footnote, academic Aristotelian tragedy. And from Japan, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: father, sons, beautiful and delicious fish.

In April, a couple of very different films that wouldn't be on this list under old rules: Temple Grandin, a 2010 HBO film about the autistic pioneer in humane treatment of livestock, featuring a mindboggling performance by Claire Danes; and Attack the Block (2011), maybe the best of several very good schlocky sci-fi flicks in recent years. Back to the art house for Boy, your standard coming-of-Maori-age story. Then, at home, having been cheated out of it on an M4, Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's crime-and-punishment documentary. Damsels in Distress: pure goofy pleasure from Whit Stillman.

Brit Marling is the highlight of a slow May as a creepy-beautiful messiah in Sound of My Voice, which she also cowrote.

In June, I was mostly distracted, but when I came home, Wes Anderson's magical Moonrise Kingdom was waiting for me.

Speaking of magic, Beasts of the Southern Wild is magical realism for us who don't much care for magical realism. But even with the June asterisk, this is three consecutive months with just one notable each.

August brought Ruby Sparks, which you'd expect from the poster and the trailer to be a smart but safe romcom. Well, there's nothing safe about it, and I'm not even sure if the "com" is accurate--maybe the best surprise of the year. But that's 4 straight one-notable months.

Hope Springs in September (well, not for Mets fans, but let's not talk about that), which I may overrate because it surprised me by not being schlocky. Chicken with Plums, heartbreaking beauty from Marjane Satrapi. Hello I Must Be Going I filed under expected-to-like-but-not-this-much. And then I saw the rough cut of Scary Normal, but let's save that for 2013.

October, Pitch Perfect, one of the funniest films of the year; my daughter has passed along the book on which it's based, with annotations by her & my son-in-law, and I look forward to reading and commenting on that in the new year. Searching for Sugar Man may be the most implausible music documentary I'll ever see, and I mean that in a good way. "Argo fuck yourself!" Cloud Atlas is a flawed, magnificent adaptation of what is probably my favorite novel of the millennium to date.

November takes Flight, which morphs from action entertainment into moral ambiguity, with Denzel. But for moral ambiguity, it can't hold a runway flare to The Flat, a documentary about an Israeli couple and their friend in the SS and his wife. Holy Motors is one of the trippiest trips of the year, and (dammit, Jennie Tonic, I've given you plenty of time to find this out for yourself) its soundtrack includes the #1 pleasant stunner of the year: Sparks, "How You Getting Home?" Yes, dammit, a Bond flick: Skyfall. And then a Spielberg one: Lincoln is pure magnificence.

In December, Anna Karenina didn't quite hit me like a runaway train, but I was prepared to dislike it, and it made that impossible. This Is 40 is all but great. Django Unchained is great, bloody great.

And that's the year, and it's 4 minutes to midnight in Illinois, so instead of figuring out a top however many now, I think I'll call my favorite filmmaker and return to the question in daylight.